by Helen Grant
Veerle drifted with him. She said, ‘Bram?’ She wanted to tell him to slow down, to eat something, to prepare himself for what they were going to do, if that were possible.
Bram said, ‘You don’t have to come with me.’
His tone was not unfriendly but Veerle was piqued all the same.
‘Of course I’m coming with you.’ She hefted the backpack up on her shoulder. ‘How are we going to get up there? De ladder?’
Bram shook his head. ‘We can’t get near enough from there. There’s a street between the blocks.’
Then how? Veerle wanted to say, but Bram didn’t look in the mood for conversation. She had never seen him look as grim as this, even last night when she had told him what she had seen. Instead she paced along beside him, doing her best to prepare herself for whatever lay ahead.
All the same, she was shocked when she found out what Bram had planned. He led Veerle down a backstreet, checking that there was no one in sight. The street was mostly lined with scruffy garage doors and windows with the security shutters rolled down. Bram walked down it at a brisk pace, scanning the façades, until he found what he wanted: a rundown-looking front door, the red paint faded almost to pink. Next to it was a dusty window, streaked with dirt, and above that a faded and hopeless TE KOOP sign.
Bram had his backpack off his shoulders and was stripping off his jacket and the sweatshirt he had on underneath. Veerle watched in perplexity as he wrapped the sweatshirt carefully around his hand. She had some inkling of what he intended to do, but she still gasped when he stood a step forward and punched the window in.
Glittering shards rained down on the cobblestones. Bram kicked out the glass fangs that jutted up from the bottom of the windowframe. He picked up his backpack and threw it inside. Then he unwound the sweatshirt from his hand and threw that in too. As he was putting his jacket back on he glanced at Veerle, who was watching him open-mouthed.
‘Are you coming?’
Veerle glanced up and down the street. Incredibly, nobody seemed to have heard a thing, or if they had, they weren’t investigating. She took off her own backpack and, ducking a little to avoid the jagged edges at the top of the window, followed Bram through it.
Even once she was safely inside the building she didn’t like to speak, not with the broken window at her back. She waited until they were climbing the scuffed wooden stairs before she said anything.
‘Did you have to do that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How did Marnix get up there?’
‘I don’t know. He had some route of his own. I’ve never done this block.’
Veerle grimaced to herself at that, wondering whether there would even be a way out onto the roof. She was praying that there would be; in Bram’s current mood he seemed quite likely to break into a second property if this one was useless, and their luck wouldn’t hold for ever.
This time it did, though. They zigzagged up dusty staircases and passed rooms with bare boards and nothing inside them except the musty smell of dereliction, and on the top floor they found a window that looked out onto a small square of ribbed metal roofing. Bram seized the latch boldly. The window opened without much difficulty; it was a little stiff but not locked. Bram climbed out without hesitation, leaving his backpack on the floor.
Veerle stood for a moment on the inside, listening for sounds from below – anything that would suggest that the break-in had been noticed. Silence. She put her bag next to Bram’s and climbed out after him. She was trying very hard not to think too carefully about what they were doing.
Just do it, just get on with it. You’re committed now, anyway.
She followed Bram, who was moving cautiously across the metal roof. This was unknown territory; presumably there were ways across it, since Marnix and the other person, the one she was doing her best not to think about it, had moved about up here. All the same, a false move up here could be literally fatal. Trying to follow Marnix across this rooftop terrain was as hazardous as trying to follow a mountaineer across an ice face. Any given point of the surface underneath could be the weak one, the rotted beam or the missing bolt, the place where a foot could go right through or, worse, a whole person. The sloping surfaces that gleamed dully in the morning sunshine could be the chutes that launched you screaming into space.
Veerle was used to heights, she was hardened to them from the climbing she did, but still she found her heart thumping and she could hear the sighing of her own breathing. She could see where she and Bram had to go, and she didn’t like the look of it. The flat roof where they had last seen Marnix standing was on the west side of the block, overlooking the Gravensteen; the house they had broken into was on the east side. There was an unbroken series of rooftops from where they stood to where they needed to be, but in the centre of the block, like the caldera of a dead volcano, was a wide open space, a pit, a drop of several storeys into a scruffy-looking yard.
Veerle’s gaze traced out the route they would have to take. Most of it was pretty easy, she judged – all of it in fact, except the traverse that would take her and Bram from east to west. From here, she could see no way of doing that without going along the side of a sloping roof, picking their way along a gutter that could be anything from a reassuring metre wide to a single foot’s width.
Don’t think about it. Just do it.
She followed Bram as he climbed from the ribbed metal section onto the neighbouring roof. The roof ridge had a convenient flat section wide enough to be a path if you kept your nerve. Veerle thanked heaven that it had not rained in the night. If that flat section had been slick with wet she might not have dared attempt it. As it was, the surface was dry and she was able to walk along it easily in her Converse trainers. The enormity of the open sky wheeled above her head, sending tiny prickles of cold apprehension through her, light and icy as falling snowflakes. She forced herself to keep her eyes firmly on the roof. It was a relief to get to the other end.
After that they had to scale a small tiled roof and slide carefully down the other side. There was no danger of falling off there because it abutted the wall of another, higher building, but Veerle could see very clearly that her fears had been well founded: there was no other way to go west than to walk along the gutter of the next roof, right next to the drop.
Bram turned to look at her. ‘You can wait here if you want.’
‘No,’ said Veerle, but the word was leaden in her mouth. She found herself swallowing.
They examined the gutter. It wasn’t so very bad, Veerle thought; the gutter itself was set into a parapet that was wide enough to walk along without difficulty. If it had been ten centimetres above the ground she could have run along it without thinking twice. But now . . .
She looked into the drop, and then wished she hadn’t. If you fell from there, there would be nothing to break your fall until you landed in that disreputable-looking yard far below.
Don’t look down, you idiot. She should have learned that by now.
Bram had started along the parapet, moving cautiously but with determination. There was a rigidity to the way he held his head which suggested that he too was willing himself not to look down. He held his arms a little way from his body, for balance, and Veerle saw that the hands were curled into fists.
She waited for him to reach the other end. How far was it? Only three or four metres, she judged. Not really so very far. All the same . . .
Veerle stepped onto the parapet. Instantly the empty space seemed to swoop at her, to press on her from all sides. It was hungry, it wanted to suck her into itself, pull her over the edge.
She stopped, her breathing shivering in and out of her mouth.
Come on, she said to herself. You’ve done other stuff just as bad as this. You’d think nothing of this on the climbing wall.
On the wall, though, she always had a rope. The only thing that would spool out after her if she fell off here would be her own scream, and it would follow her the whole way, right down to the ground.
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Three metres, she said to herself. Maybe four.
Veerle was conscious of Bram standing at the other end of the parapet, his face and blond hair a light patch at the periphery of her vision. She dared not look directly at him. It was useless to let her gaze snag on anything other than the way ahead, and even more useless to give anyone else pleading glances. The only person who could make her cross safely was herself.
She stepped forward and felt the side of her foot flex inside her trainer, as though she was about to go over on it. The rush of adrenalin was instant and fierce, a streak of silver lightning through her body. Veerle shifted her weight slightly, stabilizing herself. The fear thrumming through her was so strong that she was afraid she would actually be sick.
She tried to make herself focus. Calm down, calm down, she said to herself, trying to make the words louder in her head than the screaming of her nerves. She took another step.
Bram said nothing, afraid to distract her. The only sounds that came to her ears were the distant murmur of traffic, the cry of a bird, her own ragged breathing.
Don’t think about it. That was the only way to tackle it. The more she thought about what would happen if she stumbled, if she fell, if she actually fainted from fright, the more likely it would be to happen. Don’t think – don’t think . . .
Veerle put one foot in front of another, and then she took another step, and then another. She imagined her vision narrowing down to a slim intense beam like a laser, everything outside it unseen: the sloping tiles, the drop to her left, Bram on the other side.
How far have I come now? A metre and a half, two metres?
Turning round to look was impossible. Reversing her steps was impossible. Veerle kept moving forward.
Suddenly it was impossible to unsee Bram. They were so close that she could almost have reached out and touched him. Veerle made herself cover the last metre slowly and carefully; it would have been too easy to lunge forward now, wanting to get the whole thing over and done with, and slip . . .
Then she was stepping onto the roof at the other end, into the safety of a deep gully between two neighbouring roofs, with nowhere to fall, and Bram was putting his arms around her, pulling her into an embrace.
Veerle felt an irresistible urge to move further down the valley between the two roofs, to put some space between herself and that appalling drop. The relief of having crossed it safely was so strong that she felt light-headed. She was almost afraid that at the very last she really would pass out and slide over the edge. She pulled Bram into the gully with her.
They sat down side by side, backs to one of the sloping roofs, feet pressed against the other, and caught their breath.
‘Bram?’
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t think I can go back that way. I don’t care if we have to break into someone’s attic or climb down the chimney or something. I just don’t want to do that again.’
‘OK,’ agreed Bram. His voice sounded strained, out of breath. Veerle guessed that he had hated making the crossing as much as she had. He was silent for a few moments. Then he said, ‘We should keep moving. If we stay here . . .’
His voice trailed off, but Veerle knew what he meant. If they stayed there, they would simply lose more of their nerve; they would have too long to contemplate what lay ahead.
They got to their feet and went to find Marnix’s body.
33
It was not difficult to find the flat stretch of rooftop they were looking for with the looming bulk of the Gravensteen to orient them. The traverse along the gutter was the worst of the route; the rest was relatively easy. They slid along the ridge of a tiled roof, riding it like the scaled back of a dragon, climbed down a peeling section of whitewashed wall and found themselves in a cramped and filthy corner behind a stout chimney stack with four pots on top of it.
Veerle knew that chimney stack. The last time she had seen it, she had been staring down from the top of the Gravensteen, straining to catch a glimpse of movement behind it. It had been night, and what light there was had been the sickly amber of streetlamps and the castle illuminations, interleaved with jagged patches of black shadow. Now everything was defined clearly by the bright morning light. All the same, she had no difficulty recognizing the chimney stack: those four pots were distinctive. Marnix’s killer had stood exactly where she and Bram were standing.
The thought appalled Veerle. Mere hours separated her and Bram from a monster. He had occupied the same space they were occupying – breathed the same air. Suddenly she didn’t want to be in that confined space. She stepped over the corner of an adjoining roof and out into the open.
She saw Marnix almost immediately. What had been a person – Bram’s friend – was now a lump, a shapeless black patch like a sack of refuse, huddled on the gritty rooftop near the parapet.
Veerle was conscious of Bram at her shoulder, his breathing an audible series of shudders. As if by mutual consent they began to walk slowly towards that huddled shape, each wanting to know but not really wanting to see, moving forward but delaying the evil moment.
Marnix was lying on his back, his legs drawn up slightly and twisted to the side. He was wearing dark trousers, the kind you’d have worn for climbing or hillwalking in cold weather, and a soft shell jacket in a colour that was nearly but not quite black. Under the jacket was a light-coloured T-shirt with a Rorschach stain of dark reddish brown on the upper part of it. There was more of that red-brown on the pale exposed skin and the surface of the roof.
Veerle saw that Marnix had very dark hair; it was thick and rather dry so that it stuck up in places like the thick fur of an animal. He was unshaven, and the dark stubble stood out against the skin, which was so pallid that it had an almost grey tinge in the cold morning sunlight. His mouth was open and so were his eyes. Veerle saw that they were blue-grey. There was a strange fixed look to that dead gaze that made her think of the opaqueness of glass tumbled by the sea.
Under Marnix’s jaw there was a bloody and mangled rent.
Veerle wanted to turn her head and look away, but she couldn’t. She just stood there, taking it in: the twisted body, frozen in place by Death; the open eyes; the gash under the jaw.
Bram made an incomprehensible noise beside her, a harsh sound in his throat as though he were choking on what he was seeing. Veerle reached out blindly for his hand, gripping it with her fingers; it was lifeless in hers, as though Bram were unaware that she was even there.
After a moment he said, ‘I thought – I was hoping . . .’
‘I know,’ said Veerle, her own voice unnatural in her ears. Bram had hoped that perhaps she had been mistaken, that there would be nothing to find up here. Perhaps he had even been talking himself into thinking that she, Veerle, was deluded – seeing murder where there was none. She was, after all, the ultimate unreliable witness – the girl who had seen a dead man trying to drag the living back into Death with him. But Veerle had known what she had seen from the top of the Gravensteen: it wasn’t a practical joke or a half-hearted scuffle. It was the brutal extinguishing of life.
The body still held her gaze with some grim magnetism.
‘What’s that?’ she said suddenly.
‘What?’ said Bram. He sounded groggy, punch drunk.
‘That white stuff.’ Veerle let go of Bram’s hand and pointed. There was a line of it – or at least, there had been to begin with, before the white powder, whatever it was, had become soaked in the red-brown stain on Marnix’s T-shirt. A wavering blurry line, running across Marnix’s chest like a knife slash. Where there was no blood it showed clearly; where it crossed the drenched T-shirt it was visible only as a texture.
Salt, thought Veerle. Then she thought, Salt, like that line of it we saw on the roof, the first time Bram took me up there. Salt, like they found on Daan De Moor’s body. She could make no immediate sense of it, but she understood that there was some meaning here, something she wasn’t grasping.
Bram said, ‘And what’s that?’<
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Neither of them liked to get too close to the body, with those twisted limbs and those wide open eyes. Instead they leaned over, trying to see.
‘It looks like a nail,’ said Veerle eventually. ‘An old one. It’s all black.’
Bram moved forward, brushing her as he did so, and she reached out to try to grab his arm, to tell him not to touch the body; that was a job for the police. Too late: Bram was already squatting on the roof, but the thing he picked up was not the iron nail, it was something else, something that lay within an arm’s length of Marnix’s dead hand.
Bram picked it up carefully, making sure not to leave tracks on the dusty roof surface with his fingers. Then he showed it to Veerle.
‘Marnix’s mobile phone.’ He slid it into his pocket.
‘Shouldn’t we leave it here?’
Bram shook his head. ‘We need it.’
‘What for?’
Bram looked at her, and his expression was so fierce that Veerle was taken aback. ‘I’m not leaving him here. How often does anyone come up here? Practically never. We have to call the police.’
‘I know, Bram.’
‘We use my phone or your phone, the police are going to have the number in two seconds flat. There are probably a few public call boxes left in Ghent, but the only ones I can think of are at the station, which is full of people. You want someone standing next to you listening to every word?’
‘No,’ said Veerle. She didn’t want to argue with Bram. This was grief wearing anger like mourning dress. There was nothing she could say to make it better.
After a moment Bram said abruptly, ‘We should go.’
‘Bram,’ said Veerle reluctantly, ‘I meant what I said. I don’t want to go back the same way.’
‘We’ll try the way we saw Marnix coming,’ said Bram.
They backed away from the body. Veerle looked at the flat roof surface, at the sweeps and gouges in the accumulated dust and grime. She didn’t think either she or Bram had left an identifiable footprint in any of that muck, but who could say for certain? It was a relief when they got to the far corner of the flat section, and were able to climb into the valley between two roofs from which they had seen Marnix appear the night before. Here the surfaces were smooth, rain washing most debris into a central gutter.
